My last four months

[nerwengreen]

questionoftheday asks: Apart from the internet/social media, what do you do in your free time?



At the moment, pretty much spend all my time with Brett. I'm not even on the internet as much as I used to be. We play board games, or watch stuff on TV (movies, various series), or go to local festivals, or drive out to random cool places that he wants to show me, or just run around town doing errands related to me setting up my flat.

I imagine there will be less of that last moving forward, since my flat is now basically set up. Most of my extra money in the last three months has gone into buying furniture, and then we spend an evening assembling them together. Brett has been hugely helpful with all of it, what with having a car to transport things in. I like that he even seems to enjoy all the shopping trips. I think it's more that we're spending time together, and what specifically we're doing isn't as important as we're doing them together. Or at least that's how I see it, as someone who doesn't really enjoy shopping but has been forced to do a lot more of it lately because there's not an Amazon.com equivalent in New Zealand that will just ship stuff to you without you having to enter any stores... Shopping with Brett is enjoyable though.

Random cool places we've been... I think so far my favorite has been the Jester House, which has a stream with giant eels in it that you can buy ground chicken to feed. They're part of New Zealand's wildlife. We also did a drive up the Maitai River Valley, but didn't get out at the dam because it was raining really hard when we got there. We went to the start of the Boulder Bank which is this giant extension of cobblestones that goes from Atawhai (north of Nelson) all the way across the bay and down past the port (there's a Maori myth that explains why it's there, I'm not sure what the scientific reason for it is). We've gone to Mapua and Motueka and Rabbit Island.

There was also a weekend trip to Christchurch, because he wanted to go to a concert there and invited me along, and then turned it into a roadtrip with a stay at a backpackers. Lots of amazing scenery on the way there and back. We met and had dinner with some friends-of-friends while we were down there too. Overall a great trip.

Festivals... there are festivals here basically all of the time, as far as I can tell. Food festivals, cultural festivals, art festivals, music festivals, markets... after a while, the food trucks and many of the vendors are the same at all of them. (This is good for finding specific food trucks that I really like.)

We also often get together to watch movies with another friend, Julia, on a working holiday from Germany, who was my flatmate when I first arrived for about a day and a half before she moved elsewhere. And sometimes Julia brings other friends as well. So far every movie except the one we're seeing tonight (Alita) has been with Julia. Stuff we've watched: Venom, Fantastic Beasts 2, Mortal Engines, Aquaman, I can't remember what else...

For TV watching, it's either something he owns on DVD, or Netflix, or my friend's Plex server. We've watched all of Firefly, Harry Potter (because we saw Fantastic Beasts 2), the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Childhood's End, two movies about Ant Man, the first season of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the first season and some of the second of The Good Place, and a smattering of other movies.

And then board games are too numerous to mention here. I update my Logged Plays on Boardgamegeek.com though.

Alas, all of the above is going to come to an end for the next three months, because tomorrow I fly to Sydney. It's going to take some adjusting to not have him around all the time, but probably harder on him because he'll still be here living the rest of his life like he was doing before, while I'm about to get plunged into a whole new place with a whole new routine and will probably have plenty of stuff to keep me occupied.

So, Sydney. I'll be at a homestay with a single mom with two daughters. I'll be taking a class and working with a thesis advisor that I haven't met yet. We're supposed to do lots of ambitious things in the next three months. I guess pretty much I'll be forced to actually get back to focusing on the PhD that I'm supposedly here for.